it without the law from moscow every month in our top stories across roads are some of bin laden the reason for the u.s. invasion of afghanistan is gone now the world is waiting to see if his death will bring about change and how america handles the ongoing conflict. and the victory over terror on russian soil by chief al qaeda coordinated in the north caucuses has been eliminated officials hopeful the news will devastate the region's terrorist network. strikes in libya seemingly getting in nato no way that the possibility of

a ground attack looming ever more experts say that was the alliance's plan all of the. billboard is here in half an hour's time but for now it's cross talk with people they were enjoy. you can. still. go and welcome to cross talk i'm peter lavelle with the killing of osama bin laden what is changed u.s. president barack obama says justice has been done and that the world is better and a safer place bin laden is no more so as the so-called war on terror been worth it . and. crossed out the war on terror in the post bin laden era i'm joined by patricia de

janeiro a professor of international security at new york university's department of politics in irvine we have mark divine he's a professor of history at the university of california irvine he's also author of the book heavy metal islam rock resistance and the struggle for the soul of islam and a new buy we have dan editor in chief at pakistan. beast dot com pakistan's alternative policy institute and news service this is cross-talk air you can jump in anytime you want here mark obama said the world is a better place it's a safer place and importantly he said justice has been done over the last ten years over the last ten years on the war on terror has justice been done. but i think as a new yorker a lifelong new yorker and so recently certainly. i'm certainly happy to see that it's gone and that is not what i think would be just then but i think the other

arguments that the world safer i'm not sure that they're really true at this point because most people think he hasn't had any kind of operational command of al qaeda and the franchises that have grown are in fact more dangerous than al qaeda central is at the moment and you know and his death itself is probably going to spawn a lot of violence and retribution so i think that argument is not really true and i think if the policies don't change very quickly on the part of the obama administration in long term this is really going to be a footnote however applies and he might be for americans in a war that should have ended a long time ago interesting on patricia and when mark was getting at exactly where i want to go on this program by the way the quote unquote war on terror is fought is it could it be any different now because it would seem that obama may have some options here if you really want to get out of afghanistan and he can say well you know bin laden is gone ok i can start winding this thing down i mean whatever spin

he wants to to get out of a hopeless war if you think something like that could happen and how i want to stay with the theme of the war on terror how is it going to be fought after the death of bin laden. well i think he is definitely going to use this as as i direct a direct. and true way to basically be able being able to work on the withdraw from afghanistan and more appropriately iraq as well however i think you know this administration is it has not been much different than the last one is for is as far as foreign policy is concerned and you know this idea that we want to keep bases in places without the support of the governments and without really speaking to the governments the national governments and seeing how that is going to align interests and help the reason and help those governments is is just i think the wrong policy the wrong way to go with policy. at that at this time anyway you know

dan you know i want to talk a little bit about their pakistan angle because there's more questions than answers i at this point here but i mean when you look at pakistan would you say that the bush slash obama war on terror as it can be called a success by any any dimension whatsoever. i think you just have to look at the situation in pakistan today and compared to what it was before the before the occupation of afghanistan began and now today we have insurgencies in different provinces in pakistan we have daily terror attacks in which. you know hundreds of thousands of thousands of civilians to some numbers have put up to thirty thousand civilians have died in the last ten years in pakistan just from the terror attacks so i don't see this being any in any way a success even though some of the lardons killing will probably generate more and

more such attacks and if you look at the kind of success that obama is saying that this could be for afghanistan then that doesn't make any sense either because osama bin laden has been a man on the run he's got no operational capability he's not been involved in battle he's not been involved in any way in the in the liberation war in afghanistan he when i was reading the papers today in pakistan there is this statement by one of the spokesman of the afghan taliban saying that they were actually surprised that some of the lodge was actually alive up to now so that gives you an idea of what they see the relevance of osama bin laden in the actual war in afghanistan and that's that's where that's what will define the situation in pakistan in the future and the sooner the u.s. can pull out of afghanistan pakistan can solve begin begin to pick up the pieces and then we return to some sort of normalcy you know mark if i'm going to you the fact that he was in pakistan killed there there is reports coming out today that

bin laden could have been living there for six years and that is pretty remarkable on one of america's closest allies on the war on terror after billions and billions of dollars of aid and he's killed there apparently without the knowledge of the pakistani authorities which is just impossible to fathom that ok i mean what is going on here. well for me what it really calls into question is our presence in afghanistan for a decade and what it was that for its directly the only right there the only justification we had to be in afghanistan was to hunt down and capture or kill the people directly responsible for the september eleventh attacks i mean that's really the only legal and moral justification the united states would have had to be there instead we've engaged in once we went in there you know to paraphrase colin powell we broke it and so we owned it and we still own it and it's a pretty ugly thing that we own right now and the situation is worse in afghanistan

as well as in pakistan so now that we've killed him and really there's only one or two outstanding you know senior al qaeda people who are directly responsible for nine eleven what do we do that's really the question if we if we just pull out precipitously but we don't change our other policies of supporting you know corrupt in their toil regimes around the region then we're just going to leave a vacuum that the same kind of forces who are very angry at western policies are going to fill and we could be back in the same situation again in a year or two if we if we if we pull out as patricia suggested do it in a way that also says we're we're cleaning the board and we're no longer going to be engaging in the policies that helped lead to the rise of these kinds of terrorist organizations then i think there's a chance that you know even if we have to leave afghans and pakistanis to sort out things for themselves in a very ugly and violent way it's not going to lead it's not going to we are not going to be part of the problem and we're not going to be part of the blame that is

going to lead to. more and more terrorism against western or specifically u.s. interests i'm going to go down this democracy with a little bit later in the program but patricia i'd like to ask you i mean you know from the position of the united states you know could people in the obama administration say look the war on terror is a success we finally got the guy ok took a long time it'll be hard. to explain this thing with pakistan but you know you know you will finesse it here i mean what i'm getting at listening to what mark said i mean could be the wrong lessons to be learned from the death of going on because people will say look you know it took a long time we knew would be hard the long war we were able to hold and it's a long war because i'm kind of hoping to kind of going on mark side here so you can we learn from these mistakes and stop you've got these kinds of interventions like this but this create terrorism. well following up on that i mean i think the stephanie could be used in a political sense and it probably will be used in a political sense because by both republicans and democrats i'm sure the

republicans will find some way to make this time in currently by obama but it was overall a good thing and the obama administration again will use it in a political sense but i think we also have to look at this larger issue and i think mark alluded to it when he was just speaking on that point is that you know america is over all our foreign policy is so reactionary it's very coercive it's not comprehensive at all and i think it's time that this country sits back and decides how long it's to engage with the rest of the world obama started out with a great policy of engagement regional engagement more a more regional engagement with the iranians with the arabs in the region and the middle east peace process and this whole focus on getting the war in afghanistan under control and organized because it's been chaotic from the get go but that all of that fell apart and we went back to this whole idea that getting one person

whether it be cut off whether he was saying and now it's osama bin laden back to solomon this whole idea is we're missing a greater picture of what's happening in the world and what's happening throughout this reason in the democratic sense which you said you want to get to as well dan you know you the last time you were on the program we talked about pakistan and i asked you is the united states and pakistan on the same page so i'm going to ask you that question again on this program here because what is going on here i mean this is just amazing you know i mean i i came across some analysis that will it least one pakistani official said privately that well it's better to keep an eye on him because if we killed him or given him up he would have caused more violence i mean what kind of rationale is there to be hiding this person well taking money in one hand and lying to your most important strategic ally the united states i know the sentiment in pakistan is very anti-american. i think there's a difference i mean the situation and the sentiment in pakistan is anti american

but it's at the same time the people of pakistan have lived rejected the the ideology that is attributed to osama bin laden a long time ago we have terrorist in the parker son who are working on the same ideology attacking pakistani state and if you look at the statements have come from the usama bin laden camp in the past and from me. as well where they have openly called to attack the pakistani state and o'clock sunday army so it doesn't make any sense for me to even consider the possibility that a pakistani state would be protecting a man who promotes attacking the pakistani state so you know it just it's sounds really ridiculous if you don't but again if i help you if i can stay with you i mean how do you how was it he was there a living in a compound i don't know how palatial it was i mean it looks like it was some reports it was a pastor a million dollars that was very well protected i mean somebody knew he was there. see the thing is there's been various reports that have come in over the past few

years about his location so it's obvious that he has been moving he has been on the run and if we're talking about the possibility of the pakistanis protecting him surely they would have picked a place which would make it give them some measure of deniability exist in case he was picked up and you know to avoid the kind of questions that are being asked now so i think he has he had been moving we i remember in the earlier days when i think prepared musharraf repeatedly said that if there is actionable intelligence on where osama bin laden has shared with us and we will go after him and yesterday watching the press conference at the white house yesterday the only real actionable intelligence that has come in since tora bora was was the day before yesterday when they actually came in and and took them out all right then i'm going out there helping everybody has to get him to go to a short range go to a short break after the break we'll continue our discussion on the so-called war on terror stay with our.

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welcome across calculable to remind you we're talking about the death of the world's terrorist number one. can. ok mark and i could go to you you know we've been here across talk of obviously been watching the events unfolding the last six months in the north africa starting with the media all the way to what has happened in pakistan and in looking back at the ten years of the so-called war on terrorism in the last six months when it been just a whole lot more cheaper a lot more morally correct just to prove to stop protecting dictators and promote democracy because to date the b a b and the the spring in the in the in the arab world north africa has is not fundamentally anti-american i mean it seems to me just would've been a lot cheaper

a lot more moral just to go against the real bad guys and then al-qaeda would have just disappeared. well you said two things which i think you're missing a third of probably would have been certainly cheaper from the standpoint of american taxpayers it would have been certainly more moral but would have been would have been more profitable and that's the problem this is this larger system that the u.s. has been so important in creating and sustaining in the last half century of supporting you know these ruthless autocracies dictatorships and monarchies because they support our interests this ultimately is about money it's about oil it's about a gigantic weapons in arms and petroleum complex you know eisenhower first talked about it in the fifty's but it's great it's grown enormously since then and really this is what obama's been up against i think one patricia talked about how he started off with their great speech in cairo and wanting to re found u.s. policy but it's obvious he came very quickly against an incredible set of entrenched economic political and military interests that he's had to back off

against and so instead of really supporting the arab spring and really getting ahead of the curve and getting arab public opinion and muslim public opinion on his side he really has been playing behind the ball i saw that from being in egypt or in during the uprising and i think it's very costly to us foreign policy and that's why you know that capture death of bin laden isn't going to actually affect things that much if we don't actually stop the larger system that we've been supporting so wholeheartedly all these years and still are if we look at bahrain and look at our support for saudi arabia for look at our refusal to really condemn syria patricia but i'm not i'm i refused to be so pessimistic i agree one hundred percent with mark but nonetheless here but if the message is out there is that the. jihad is. if we if we just support more democracy we don't have to worry about all of these extremist groups because it's people on the ground are telling us what they want and we've seen it over and over again they're getting

a lot of resistance in some countries and the united states is it has not done the moral thing into. pouring them but i mean eat what it is these people on the ground continue to do it eventually it will coincide with the different policies of other countries i mean i'm speech cannot continue to do say you can't have democracy when you spoil boiling process continues and continues to the genie is out of the bottle it certainly is out of the bottle and we are way behind it i mean if you look at turkey and iran there ahead of us right now you know this in ministration. markowitz or it was three or four weeks into egypt where they are you know mubarak was getting on the plane in the ministry so it was putting together a task force to look at what they wanted to do in egypt he you know running around the world in order to keep the military in business after one man is just it's absurd and i mean there are two issues here that are that are inhibiting

us moving forward from foreign policy in the foreign policy matter and the first one is that we're really not seeing of the find a policy out of the white house we're not seeing leadership coming out of the white house that's the first thing the second thing we're seeing is this this absolute baker ring and childish behavior in congress that they you know they're running around the world i guess by near went around afghanistan just recently but he came back with nothing except saying oh well general petraeus said things are going well there you know these guys have got to roll their sleeves up and find out what's happening in the world find out how to get america on course and stop pandering to a lot of these interest groups that are pushing these this type of behavior i mean we're just behind the curve and we may still be america's superpower and the strongest military in the world but we're certainly not using any of our resources the fact of the way and in fact or hurting our military and our foreign policy

establishment quite. infinitely if you ask. you know dan how's who's going to affect. what landmark going jumping going. good mark you know only the only problem is of course is that the people that are our congressmen and women are pandering to are the ones who are funding their re-election so it really comes down to that as long as they're being supported and funded by these very forces that profit from these empire of bases in global war on terror how could they ever go against them ok if you can depending on how things pan out over the next few days here is the relationship between united states and some elements within the pakistani military and security forces it is going to change or is it something fundamental happen here. i think it's in the interests of both parties all the parties involved actually to keep the relationship going and take this this is this

what's happened in a couple of days ago is actually works out for the best of everyone was on the bin laden had been a liability for for the for al qaeda itself actually i mean if you look at it he had been on the run and then he had been a liability for pakistan because they were reports coming in on his side of things in a lot of different places so now that this this is buried. buried at sea but this issue is actually done and dusted americans should obama should use this as an opportunity to to be looking for a safe exit in afghanistan for the last couple of years they've been looking for an opportunity and things have been getting worse and you know you won't get an opportunity like this this is a godsend for him so i think we should really start looking to use this opportunity to pick up the losses and get out basically before before it gets any worse mark and we were at the start of the spring in afghanistan the taliban have declared

a new operation bother so you know the casualties will rise up and there will be pressure at home on obama to bring bring the forces on not that osama bin laden step mark what do you think about that you think obama is going to do what it world the right thing here this gives him a way to get out of afghanistan. because i mean there's no there's no hope of winning that war there i mean he's coming up for reelection so is this really the card he's going to play and say look you know i mean mission accomplished really mission accomplished this time and we start the process of withdrawal because everything that is logical everything else said on this program here tells me that's not going to happen because that's not not the logic of american foreign policy. well i mean i think that would be the easy thing and certainly he would love to wind down afghanistan and i would i certainly hope that most if not all u.s. troops would leave as soon as possible but again if you do that without creating some conditions both in terms of a fundamental change in our foreign policy so people aren't so angry at us which

helps fuel the recruiting and to al qaeda and you don't you haven't spent any time in the past ten years creating conditions on the ground for something approaching a participatory democracy what is the vacuum that you're going to leave behind and are you going to wind up having afghanistan become again a haven for groups that that will attack the u.s. or or western interests so i think you might do that and hope and pray that the next major attack doesn't come from afghanistan and doesn't come on his watch but you know things have a way of repeating themselves you know the water flows the same way down to the ocean if you don't change its course and unfortunately i think that's what would happen if pulling out isn't part of a larger strategic rethink and reshift in u.s. strategic and foreign policy where you are you seem to be agreeing there patricia do you want to add on to that. i wholeheartedly agree i think you know

it's been a it's but bottom line it's been a difficult intervention in afghanistan there are so many parties there are so many players there that i can. you know it's just been extremely poorly managed and. you know i was against the surge and hoping that would change the management would change at that time but it didn't at all and i ended but i do think i think the drawdown is happening the change announced with general petraeus was indicative of that this particular you know killing of osama bin laden that's also going to be used towards that nato has agreed to pull out by twenty card two thousand and twelve so these are all issues showing us are these are all factual areas that the drawdown is coming in or on our way i do think though having been an honest son several times over and over again for the past five years that we need to be able responsible in how we do this and we need to get the players to the table and they need to decide how better to manage their own country and their own place because i

do think if we just you know again pack up and walk out like we did during after the the soviet invasion were we are going to have a lot of similar problems including influence there from not just the soviet union as it was in the past but who's back to stand on all of the surrounding countries including china and it's clear it's going to be a very very difficult call reads and to manage that act you know at that point as well you know now that it is an hour and here again i mean i agree with our other guests that we have a lot of consensus on the program here day but he's really no changes on everything ran for the last ten years in afghanistan he's really hoping your and your expectation is that somehow wake up and get it right i mean what is the right way to get out of afghanistan where pakistan can keep its security interest it's a legitimate sovereign country that it is a victim of terrorism quite often. i think we were well the to come to the first point of this question first question is is there any hope i have my doubts

obviously looking at the past history of the region and coming to the second point whether what needs to be done is to take into account the sensibilities and in the and illegitimate real concerns of the immediate neighborhood of the sun such as pakistan especially because we have been at the receiving end over the past many past past decade and we have suffered. losses not just economically but in terms of lives as well like the sons interest need to be taken on board and they need to work together to come to a strategy and work towards. you know an exit for for america that leaves the reason stable and and you know addresses the concerns of the sun's immediate neighbors what you think about their mark i'll give you the last word but oh ok patricia go ahead you want to say i really fundamentally ok mark you get the last

word go ahead. just very quickly and maybe the other two colleagues can very quickly comment on this i think clinton or or even obama need to meet with senior publicly meet with senior taliban leaders on both sides of the border to really declare in essence a truce and an obama needs to challenge them now to actually in the best interests of their people and their religion and their culture is by by supporting a real you know peace and development plan for for afghanistan and of course for pakistan as well because without one the other doesn't happen all right folks we've all want out of time this was a conversation ten years in the make in the making many thanks my guest today and for of the new york and in dubai and thanks to our viewers for watching us here darkie see you next time remember across. the. street.